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Moving From Disparate Tools to an All-In-One Platform
Before HubSpot, Software2 was using several disparate tools for its marketing. For example, it used MailChimp and ActiveCampaign for its email marketing and automation, GoToWebinar for its webinars, a separate landing page tool and a standalone CMS (content management system). What's more, its sales CRM (customer relationship management) system was also completely disconnected from its marketing tools.
Software2's CMO, Peter Cooke, says, "Because all of our tools were disconnected, we had no visibility into how marketing was impacting sales and how leads were flowing through the pipeline." The company wanted an all-in-one platform that would provide a comprehensive view of the ROI its marketing activities were generating for the business. Software2's Senior Vice President, Marcus Conway adds. "We needed to have full visibility on how a prospect was engaging with us. This included understanding when they first visited our website, all the way through to becoming a customer. We also needed to have visibility of onboarding, and then potentially help our customers to buy add-on products that provide additional value."
Peter's job was to find the best platform to solve the problem. He put together a specification document evaluating various tools, like Zoho, HubSpot, and a couple of other well-known industry standard platforms. He chose HubSpot for its all-in-one-platform, flexibility and ease of use. Marcus says, "HubSpot was the only platform in the marketplace that was easy to implement and use. It also allowed us to see the entire customer journey from start to finish and gave us a full view of how customers engaged with us at every touchpoint."
In September 2018, Software2 signed up for Sales Hub Enterprise and Marketing Hub Professional. Peter says, "By bringing all of our tools together into HubSpot's platform, we've really been able to ramp up our efforts."
A Full View of the Customer Journey Leads to More Sales
With the help of HubSpot's onboarding team, Software2 was able to quickly and easily migrate its entire database from its sales CRM over to HubSpot. The onboarding team also helped Software2 replicate its marketing campaigns, landing pages, templates, web pages, etc. in HubSpot. Peter says, "HubSpot helped us add even more value to our campaigns."
The company also found it simple to integrate its webinar tool, GoToWebinar with HubSpot. Peter says, "we just watched a 30-second video about how to do it, then clicked two buttons to set it up. Now, the marketing team can automatically enroll contacts into its various nurture campaigns and provide them with relevant content, once a webinar is complete.”
Shortly after implementing HubSpot, the marketing team identified that the most impactful way to grow the business was to generate more qualified leads. To do this, they increased their focus on running webinars, events and creating more SEO-driven content.
Before HubSpot, Software2 couldn't report on the data the company needed. It took a long time to transfer data between tools, and the results were never reliable. Peter says, "We weren't able to see or report on the value marketing was adding." Now, with HubSpot's comprehensive reporting functionality Software2 can quickly and easily pull all of the data it needs for its board-level reports. This data includes overall revenue, renewal revenue, and business closed in the last 30 days. Marcus adds, "We try to understand the relationship between activity and performance. With the dashboards feature within HubSpot, we can quickly view group-level data or look at individual teams or business units. Whatever we need or however granular we need to go we can quickly and easily get that data in HubSpot."
Not long after implementing HubSpot, the company began to see a positive impact on its sales. Peter says, "Implementing HubSpot has had a huge impact on our sales team. We can now see every lead interaction directly from one platform. For example, they can see where the leads came from, how well they were being followed up with, what content prospect found interesting, what webinars they registered for, etc."Peter adds, "The visibility we now have on where the company's revenue is coming from will help define what our marketing strategy will be for years to come."
Growing Rapidly and Scaling Fast with HubSpot
Since switching to HubSpot's all-in-one platform in 2018, Software2 has experienced swift growth. Having full visibility over the customer's entire journey has also had a hugely positive impact on the company's sales. At a high level, HubSpot has contributed a 25% revenue growth in the year since implementation. In that time, our sales team has grown by 150% and they have increased the numbers of students using AppsAnywhere by 500,000 students in key regions.
A vast improvement on the marketing side of the business made a large contribution to their growth. For example, traffic & leads have both increased by 33%, along with much better visibility of where the leads came from and how they interacted.
The growth in sales productivity was also a significant factor. With one system, Software2 saved 3 hours per person, per week of labour-intensive, repetitive activities. HubSpot’s ease of use has also meant the team are also able to log and carry out activity in a much simpler way. The end result was a 180% increase of logged emails, calls and meetings.
Marcus credits HubSpot for helping the company grow. He says, "We've experienced rapid growth with HubSpot, and we see a lot of interest in the market from the changes we've made with HubSpot. That's because HubSpot has helped us provide information that's more timely, interesting, targeted and genuinely helpful for our target customers."
Software2 has no plans of slowing down in the future. The company plans to scale and expand further. Marcus says, "We plan to use HubSpot to help us understand more about the customer journey after a customer signs up. For example, we'll use HubSpot to improve customer onboarding by providing more helpful content and increasing customer satisfaction throughout the process." He adds, "HubSpot will play a key role in helping us scale, grow, and continue to provide an excellent experience for our customers."
